IPC wasn't all bad if you had that impression from an earlier post. While I may have been push out to the corners, it is a highly social school and you do end up making a lot of good friends and connections. The school is about the informal exchange of culture and learning through communication between the students in equal parts to communication from teacher to student. It is there students challenge their assumptions about other societies, start a professional career in NGOs or an in depth political analysis to bring back home. While it may sound like classes would have titles such as 'Cross Cultural Communication', 'African-European Political Relations', 'Political Organization Theory' along with the actual classes 'NGO Work I and II', 'Communication' and 'Media and the Middle East', there were equal parts Yoga, Drama and Arts. These were forums for communication between students. Classes where we expressed thoughts outside of the formal academic subjects we studied and listened, carefully, to the thoughts of others.

If you ever have the chance, please stop by www.IPC.dk and think about attending for a semester or two.

I just went ice skating for the first time in over ten years.

I fell.

Four times.

On the same spots on my body.

Please, find me some pain killers.

Family connections

When I left IPC in 2002, I had no place to go so I crashed at my mother's cousin's home until I started at a language school. Næstved can be compared to the burbs in America. Streets with longs rows of houses and nothing else other than a school and a few small services compared to larger cities. I crashed there a few times and I kinda got on peoples nerves too. I met for the first time my extended family though.
While I crashed there I was on the job hunt, but it was impossible for me. I didn't speak the language. I had a 5th grade education. No work experience. Sucks to be me. I was kinda desperate for a while and didn't know what to do. If I didn't have that family I would have been on the streets because the local government is of no help.

After a couple of times at Kalø, I spent a little time with my mother's friend in Copenhagen. I would hardly call myself the best house guest, but it was my first time in Copenhagen and a first of a few others too. I went down to Christania and bought myself a white widow. It was the first read drug and the last real drug I did. It was... interesting.

But having moved up here, I am out of real family connections and well... it sucks. Finding a job is impossible and I appreciate family now more than ever now I have less than ever before.
I hope things will improve with time though.

Sorry it is a short post, but I just want to make it a habit I update this blog often, even if it is only a macroscopic exam of a period or subject.

Thanks for reading and check back later, please.

A night out on the town

Tórshavn is special.
Not special as in it is a small fishing village special.
Or historically special.
What is special about Tórshavn are the weekends.
Cities have a night life. Chicago has a few bars and clubs. New York has Madison Square Garden. Copenhagen has Tivoli. Ibiza, São Paulo, etc. So the fact Tórshavn has one is not what makes it special.
What makes Tóshavns night life special is how the streets are packed every Friday and Saturday night around 2 AM. The clubs and bars are so close together, the edges of each club's crowd blends together and it becomes a single carnival.
Yes, you see this in Miami and certain cities in California too. But how can one expect that in the middle of the North Atlantic in a highly religious society?
The weekend speaks volumes about the kind of society the Faroe Islands is. They love to party here. They love to drink. They love having fun. This city has a quality of night life that cities either are jealous of or want to prohibit.
It is all very strange to me.

The first year in Denmark

In my first year in Denmark, I started at a school for a spring course in Globalization and Communication. I studied at IPC and got my first taste of college.
The day I arrived I felt a bit like a fish out of water. I met people from places I have never been to before. Personalities I would not consider adopting myself. Characters that would in my eyes at the time come from books.
My most vivid memory of my first few hours there is one some might call me a racist for bringing up and rant I am fabricating. It is a memory none the less.
I sat at a coffee table in the commons and was speaking with a student from the Eastern Bloc, when a very bold and outgoing student from South Africa came by and introduced himself and promptly stood behind the girl at fondled her breast. This took me aback and I expected a very strong reaction from her, but to my surprise, she smiled, laughed and, well, that is where the memory tappers off for me. I suppose they arrived a day or two before me and became acquainted.

Over the next few weeks, I was introduced to people from around the globe and both rubbed some people the wrong way the got along, kinda, with others. I was far from popular; I overheard some talk poorly of me and I can tell you, to hear that kind of candid speech hurts deeply. I wonder if diplomacy has been affected by such episodes at high level talks. Perhaps even a little war or two.

While I did come out of my shell over those 20 weeks and looked back fondly on that school and my time there, truth is, while I did improve greatly, I wasn't truly welcomed or well received. If anything, I felt like I was pushed out to the corners and found it hard to be part of the group. My time at the school was more about learning that being especially social, except for one girl who I had three kids with over the years. What I got out of those 20 weeks is a certain awareness of what is happening around the world from the school's perspective and a weight loss of 15kg.

Maybe I'll go back and have a better experience the next time around.

Back from fishing

I have been many things. Right now, I am a fisher man. I work on the long line fishing ship Hoyvikingur, a Faeroese ship.
I came back yesterday after two trips of two weeks and four days, respectively.
The work isn't my favorite, but I do not need to enjoy my job to do my job. It pays the bills. But the worst is both coming back to a very lonely Christmas eve and the constant headache and unease after overcoming the acute sea sickness.
I know she is going to see this. I know she will hold it against me for saying this publicly, but I need to let this out and she cannot expect complete privacy in cases like this.

I have three sons. I love them dearly but I am only allowed visitation. It was agreed that I would get to see them every weekend in arbitration. She told me, the night I got back, three days before Christmas eve, I wouldn't get to see them on Christmas eve because her parents do not like me. She further tried to justify her position by saying I shouldn't care since I am atheist and do not celebrate Christmas (in her world), which boils down to 'I am not christian enough for her to see the kids on Christmas eve'.

After protesting and threatening to hold her to the terms of the agreement which pointedly ignores holidays and anniversary like birthdays due to her protests to my request holidays are split, she says I was inattentive to what she said and says she thought about ice skating Friday or something on Monday, but was reconsidering in the face of my protests and threatened to not let me see the kids for three weeks if I didn't shut up, which is in it self a violation of the agreement..

Hard to find any time

New title. A Decade in Scandinavia.
I moved to the Faroe Islands in 2010. I have been here for a year now. I have been in the region for a decade come the new year.
What a difference a decade makes.

Here is a quick autobio of what I have been up to my entire life.

I grew up in an academic house. My dad worked at Argonne National Lab until Clinton's cuts. My mom was an internal medical student in Denmark. My dad had a Ph.D. from the Poly technical University, now DTU, in Quantum Physics.
Despite this, my home had real big problem. Mom and dad fought all the time. Dad drank. Mom was the do nothing, throw nothing out pack rat that never kept her word to me or even tried.
I didn't have much of a school education. My mom took me out of school in the fifth grade and didn't keep her promise to find me another school or buy the school books to teach me at home.
So from the middle of the fifth until I was 19 I was sitting at home in front of the computer. Then I moved to Denmark and was seated with learning a new language and catching up in school. By 2008, I had been to an international college studying communication and globalization, an agricultural school, a language school and I took a normal HF degree. I have worked as a farm hand, farmer, fruit picker, warehouse worker, logistician, forklift operator, retirement home orderly, postal worker, delivery man, builder, bartender and now as a fisherman. I met a girl when I first moved here and I have three kids today. I am not even 30 years old and I have done more than most over their entire lives, in terms of diversity.
So where do I go from here. I hope to leave the Faroe Islands and study Laboratory science in Denmark and follow through on a physics degree at Københavns University.
But enough on the future for now.
I think I will stay on the past, at least for a little while.

Please leave a few comments. I always enjoy them.